- It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my plus-one, repost me, maybe?".
- The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user.
- People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post.
- It was seriously annoying.
I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my own stream, other than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud.
I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few people actually post or repost material. They read on a consume-only mode, if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all profiles, and even within that set there was a phenomenal range of activity. The effect being that most of the platform was dead air.
My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this. Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid.
The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.
I really disliked this for numerous reasons:
- It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my plus-one, repost me, maybe?".
- The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user.
- People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post.
- It was seriously annoying.
I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my own stream, other than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud.
I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few people actually post or repost material. They read on a consume-only mode, if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all profiles, and even within that set there was a phenomenal range of activity. The effect being that most of the platform was dead air.
My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this. Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid.
The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.